A key plank in the Western strategy to avoid negotiations with Russia and to continue financing and arming Ukraine has been the alarming insistence that Putin is bent on going beyond Ukraine and into Europe, not stopping until he has reestablished the Soviet empire. But simultaneous explosions of two oil refineries in Hungary and Romania raise the question of whether it is not Russia, but Ukraine, that is going beyond its borders and expanding the war to Europe.

From the start of the war, Ukraine, the United States and NATO have motivated Europe to back the war with the warning that if they do not, the war will come to them. In April 2024, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith warned that NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory… because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.” 

The same warning was consistently broadcast from the very top in the United States, NATO and Ukraine. President Joe Biden told Congress that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there.... He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Then Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” Then NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg insisted that “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned his Western partners that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.” “If Ukraine loses the war,” he said, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”

It isn’t “a fact,” and he has never “made that pretty clear.” There is nothing on the historical record that suggests Putin has his sights set on Europe or on anything beyond keeping Ukraine out of NATO and protecting the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians. Putin has repeated from the start that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear.... The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.” That Moscow’s goal is keeping Ukraine out of NATO, and not moving Russia into Europe, has been corroborated at the highest levels by Ukraine’s negotiating team, by NATO, and even by Zelensky.

The deceptive fundraising claim is based on cynical misquotations and misrepresentations. It ignores the fact that Putin’s comment that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart” was followed by the addition “and those that do regret it have no brain.” It ignores that Putin’s comment that “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster” was focused, not on the absence of the Soviet Union, but on the economic hardship that followed its collapse. 

The actual historical record shows that Putin has never “kept going” but that, when Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease.

The “fact” is that the historical record suggests that Putin went to war in Ukraine, not to go to war with NATO or conquer Europe, but to prevent a war with NATO and with Europe. “Listen attentively to what I am saying,” Putin said just three weeks before the invasion. “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary.... Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member.... Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.”

Just three days before invading Ukraine, Putin said “the reality we live in” is that if Ukraine is “accepted into...NATO, the threat against our country will increase because of Article 5” since “there is a real threat that they will try to take back the territory they believe is theirs using military force. And they do say this in their documents, obviously. Then the entire North Atlantic Alliance will have to get involved.”

While the mainstream media in the West has been broadcasting the false warning that Russia will expand the war to Europe—though it may “be hugely consequential in the long term,” as Richard Sakwa, Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, suggested to me—they have utterly ignored the real concern that Ukraine already is.

On the morning of October 20, there was an explosion at Romania’s Petrotel-Lukoil refinery. In the evening of the same day, there was an explosion at the Danube Refinery, Hungary’s largest oil refinery.

Neither the date nor the targeted refineries appear to be random. That same day, European Union energy ministers advanced an EU proposal to ban new contracts for importing Russian gas by 2026 and all contracts by 2028. Hungary and Romania both still import Russian oil. Both refineries process Russian crude oil. The Petrotel-Lukoil refinery in Romania is owned by a subsidiary of Lukoil, one of the large Russian oil companies that was just sanctioned by the Trump administration. The Danube refinery in Hungary receives oil from Russia through the Druzba pipeline and also supplies oil to Slovakia.

Assuming that unexplained explosions at two European oil refineries that receive and process Russian oil occurred within a few hours on the very day that the EU moved to ban imports of Russian oil is not a coincidence, the questions of whether it was sabotage and who perpetrated the sabotage arise.

Certainly, Russia has no motive to blow up its own oil customers at a time when its oil companies are being sanctioned and its own oil refineries are being targeted by long-range Ukrainian missiles and drones.

The Hungarian media has speculated that it is Ukraine that attacked the two European countries. And there is a broad consensus among analysts that Ukraine is the likely source of the attacks. There is also suspicion that Ukraine could not have executed the strikes without American, British, or European assistance. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions. The complete omission in the Western media of what could be very consequential attacks on two European countries only fuels the speculation that the West does not want to draw attention to the attacks or to shed light on who did it. 

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The Danube refinery in Hungary receives its Russian oil via Russia’s Druzba pipeline, which has, itself, been the target of repeated Ukrainian strikes, to the great anger of Hungary.

The explosions have created acrimony in Europe, especially between Hungary and Poland, the latter of which is simultaneously refusing to extradite to Germany a Ukrainian citizen who is suspected of playing a role in the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline. Poland seemed to celebrate, and even condone, sabotage of Russian pipelines. Radoslaw Silorski, the foreign minister of Poland, posted that he is “proud” that the Polish court “ruled that sabotaging an invader is no crime” and expressed a wish that Russia’s Druzba pipeline would be successfully “knocked out.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk added that “the problem of Europe, the problem of Ukraine, the problem of Lithuania and Poland is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built.” Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs, responded with outrage at the assertion that “if you don’t like infrastructure in Europe, you can blow it up. With this, they gave advance permission for terrorist attacks in Europe. Poland has not only released but is celebrating a terrorist.”

It has not been proven that it is Ukraine who attacked the oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. But the circumstances force the question of whether it is not the false threat of Russia attacking other European countries that is pushed by the Western media that threatens expanding the war to Europe, but the threat of a desperate Ukraine attacking other European countries that is completely ignored by the Western media.